


All the thoughts that burn

by emocsibe



Series: Désespoir [2]
Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Angst, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Minor Character Death, Minor Original Character(s), Vampire Goodnight Robicheaux
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:21:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27051820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emocsibe/pseuds/emocsibe
Summary: It's 1879 and for Goodnight Robicheaux, this year marks the greatest loss of his too long life.
Relationships: Goodnight Robicheaux/Billy Rocks
Series: Désespoir [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1974349
Comments: 1
Kudos: 8





	All the thoughts that burn

_“But what of life whose bitter hungry sea_ _  
_ _Flows at our heels, and gloom of sunless night_ _  
_ _Covers the days which never more return?_ _  
_ _Ambition, love and all the thoughts that burn_  
_We lose too soon, and only find delight_ _  
In withered husks of some dead memory.”_

Oscar Wilde - Désespoir

And Goodnight sees red, his ears are still ringing from the force he snapped his head to the side with, and he runs, he doesn’t really see anything, he dodges people who happen to get in his way, and he cares not if they are friends or foes, he goes and runs and hopes – hell, he fucking prays for the first time in what, more than three hundred years. He climbs the rope leading to that damned church tower and he feels his palms bruise, feels the buttons of his vest tear as he pushes himself upwards with a speed he usually hides, and he feels his still heart jump when he sees Billy. He lies on the dusty boards, he lies amongst bullets and shells and patches of his own blood, and his eyes stare out to the sky, and they are so gloomy, so empty that it can’t possibly belong to Billy. No, no, no. Goodnight tears the fabric of his trousers and the skin on his knees as he collapses next to Billy, lifting his already cooling hand to check for pulse, and finds no flow beneath the paling skin. Something wrenches Goodnight’s chest from the inside, and he slumps forward, his forehead hitting the bloodied wood, his hair falling into Billy’s open, lifeless palm. He could have saved him, had he been faster. He could have. He didn’t. 

There’s a prickle, and then a thousand, and another in his eyes, and he cries, and he wants to shout but he can’t, and he wants to rise and embrace his other half, for the last time before he is all cold and rigid, he wants to move him and carry him down, because he trusts no one else with Billy’s safety, and he chokes out a bitter laugh, because honestly, what does it matter now? Billy can’t feel and can’t see and breathe, and Goodnight gasps for air, then remembers that he doesn’t need it, but welcomes the hurtful intrusion in his dead lungs, yes, he opens up to the pain because he needs it, needs a counterbalance to what is storming, what is wreaking havoc in his soul right now. He curls up on himself more, still facing the boards, still smelling Billy’s blood mixed with gunpowder and sand and dust, and he sobs and he knows that he is loud, but cares about nothing – how could he when his dearest one is lying in front of him, already departed from this world, from Goodnight, without a proper goodbye, without a final word exchanged, without the decades Goodnight was counting on to make this easier. No, he doesn’t care. He cries. 

He cries for days, and when he sheds his last tear, he gets up from the bed and ties a loop into his flask – into the bullet-hole that had its twin in Billy’s chest, in his heart – and heads for the fresh graves. He hangs it on the wooden cross, and sits next to the freshly moved pile of dirt. It’s Billy’s home now, so he comes to visit, and for he cannot stay, he visits every day. Rose Creek welcomes its newest settler, Emma welcomes her newest friend, but Goodnight has no eyes for the town or friends for a while, no. He is blind and deaf and mute for everyone but Billy’s grave. He is just as buried in his own soul as Billy is buried in the ground, and he knows it. He feels it, feels the worms eating his flesh and feels his body rot – and knows that he feels something that’s not happening. He hates. Hates existing, hates opening his eyes and seeing the world around himself. He despises everything that Billy no longer is able to experience. He mourns, but he never cries again, never sheds tears, but his laughter dies as well. His smiles fade, his eyes dim and his voice loses its charm, its tune of playfulness. He dies with Billy as much as he can die. 

For a while he does nothing. He reads and writes nothing, learns nothing new – except that he must have had a heart still, because only now does his chest feel empty, now that Billy Rocks is no more – and teaches nothing old as he used to. He simply is, as he is doomed to be; doomed by his curse and doomed by his own cowardice. He could end it and he knows countless ways of how and knows one reason why, but he has no strength or courage to do it. He asks Sam Chisolm after what he perceived a few years, to end his misery – but by that time Sam is old, weak and seldom leaves his bed. Goodnight pleads to not leave him alone with this, to not let him live longer than Sam, but all he finds in his friend’s eyes is slight jealousy and just enough acceptance to try and pull the trigger. The pistol, however, falls down to the duvet, Sam’s hand shaking, the gun sliding from his faltering grasp, and as he breathes the last, Goodnight breaks down in tears. He knows that he is cursed but now he feels it even more acutely. He hates life and hates death because both have denied him his greatest wishes and both have betrayed him over and over. Life didn’t catch Billy and death wouldn’t take him – they make him angry and they make him bitter and that makes him lonely. The people of Rose Creek know him, they remember him from their childhood, from the nightmare of a day when they were hiding and praying, and when little Sally and Tom looked at each other with jealousy in their eyes after Josh Faraday patted them both on their backs. They all have their own stories and memories, some of them hurtful and some of them happy, but they don’t have any memories of Goodnight after Sam’s death. They know about the lone man in a small hut at the end of the town, next to the old graves of the three, but they know nothing else. They see his blue vest with the silver pins and his black hat sometimes, peaking out of the tall grass surrounding the crosses, and that is all they see. Tom, who has grown up and broke the hearts of the girls in town by rejecting them, and then grown some more, meets him once when he is bringing flowers to Faraday’s grave, and rumour has it they even talk. Rumour never gets out about them grieving together and crying together – one with tears and one without.

“When does it stop hurting?” Tom asks, and lays down in the grass, laying his head on Faraday’s grave that is already flattened by the weather.

“I’ll let you know when I get an answer to that, son.”

Tom nods and lets his tears fall, and Goodnight envies him for having tears to spill. He slowly starts to feel a hole in his chest, but the pain has never gone away, only got silent and sharp, like a seasoned predator on the hunt. Tom goes back to the town and ages more, and then, one day, he visits the graves again. He brings a man with him this time, and Goodnight pokes his hat in greeting.

The man’s name is Joel, and Tom brings him along to say goodbye to Faraday. 

“I loved him” he says as he links together his and Joel’s fingers, looking at Goodnight all along “and it still hurts, Mr. Robicheaux, it still does. But I can’t bear it anymore. I love again, and I have to get away from the pain. Please give him some flowers in my name, even after I’m gone.”

And then Tom and Joel are gone, first only from Rose Creek, then from among the living. Tom returns to the town decades later, as a crooked, old man, and he sits down on the bench by Goodnight’s hut. He cries and Goodnight knows that now he cries for two. When Tom passes away in the following weeks, Goodnight digs the grave and he buys the coffin, as Tom has no family left. He buries him next to the three crosses, and Goodnight’s chest swells with jealousy again. Why can’t he rest beside Billy as Tom rests besides a man he had no bonds with? But then it dies down, the storm in his heart quiets, and he lives. 

The people don’t know him anymore, he is just a myth like the three old graves next to the fresh one. They look at him and they know him not, they look at him and they start to fear him. Why has he stayed, why is he staying – they question him, and when he answers, they look horrified and they hurry back to the town.

“They buried my heart here and I’m not ready to leave it” he says, and he caresses the cross that is already breaking apart and has a few lines on it that once was a name. 

The people die and his story turns to a myth, then it turns to nothing and he becomes the weird man outside the town. The ground where the graves used to be is flat and grown over by the grass, the crosses rotten to nothing a long time ago – Goodnight sits down at his usual spot and remembers Billy Rocks and then his grave and finds himself too bitter to get up. Then, as the days go by, as his life feels emptier than ever before, he stands up and walks into his hut, eyes never blinking, mouth forming words, apologies to Billy, apologies to Tom – for leaving and not bringing more flowers, for being weak, for wanting to run away. That is what he does – he collects his belongings and flees, away from his dead darling and away from Rose Creek. 

Goodnight then roams the world, visits everything he just can think of, and anywhere he is, he buys small trinkets he thinks Billy would like. He collects stories and memories and he aches to share them with Billy and his heart hurts whenever he remembers that he can’t do that. Not anymore. 

When he first visits Korea, he has to sit down after half an hour of walking around – the language is so familiar, the memories it brings up are sharp and lovely and terrible and they hurt like hell. Then, after the initial sadness he starts to feel a force drawing his attention to the words, to the sentences he does not fully understand, and he learns. He learns Korean and then he wanders to other countries and studies their language, too – it is a great way to pass the time, he realizes and clings to them, clings to the poetry he once loved, clings to the books, the way words can hurt and soothe the soul. He remembers when he read poems for Billy, and how the man looked at him with that joyous glint in his eyes, and how he whispered sweet words into his mouth after he was done and he breaks down in tearless sorrow when he realizes he can’t remember how Billy’s kisses tasted and how his hands felt against the back of his neck. 

He moves back to the States and buys himself a house – and promptly refuses to call it a home. Home was between the arms of his lover, this is a mere dwelling for him, even though it’s big enough for a whole family. There is a sofa in the living room, facing the front door; that’s where Goodnight usually sits, balancing his laptop on his legs as he translates whatever he is tasked with, as if he was waiting for someone to enter, as if he could still believe in having a reason to live. He types, the novelty of having technology in his life worn away decades ago, and he hums a little song without noticing. Aura Lee it is, one that he sang to Billy and sang to the five others in Rose Creek’s bar, and he remembers how life was there. Before the battle when the spirits were high and the hearts ready to give whatever freedom required of them and when Billy kissed him long and deep in the shadows of their room, where he laid his head on Goodnight’s chest, not bothered by the silence that welcomed him there instead of the calming beating of a living heart. He remembers the town after the battle, days after when the people still cried and mourned, weeks later when they were building back what Bogue had torn down and months, then years later when Tom came to the graves and looked at Faraday’s cross the same way Goodnight looked at Billy’s. And, oh, he remembers coming back to the States and going to Rose Creek only to find it not. He found no buildings or graves, only a vast cornfield. He walked through it, looking for the spot he had sat at for so long, only to find it not. He had lost Billy when he had died, and now he lost him again. He returned home and lit a candle on his desk and remembered Billy.

Now he lights it again, because memories are always painful; even when they carry happiness they are clouded with grief, and Goodnight is tired of it. Tired of not being able to remember the good without the bad, tired of living – once again, just like before Billy, before finding a reason to keep on going. 

He stands up and boils a kettle of water, makes the tea the way Billy liked it and before he can stop himself he pours it into two mugs. He sighs and sits down, back to the counter, legs outstretched and hands folded across his chest, shielding himself from the truth. He thought a long time ago that he would forget, that he would accept it.

He couldn’t.

He can’t.


End file.
